When I mentioned this to a friend, she said, “Well, that aligns with what I heard about college campuses in the area - today there are protests at two of the local universities against Israel.”

And there it was: the new reality.

Inside the school, we were teaching our children to remember. Outside the school, we needed additional security simply to do so.

Today, the Jewish people mark October 7th, 2023 and mourn more than 1,200 lives brutally extinguished, dozens upon dozens of acts of sexual violence, 250 hostages taken, and the invasion of a sovereign nation by terrorists who wreaked utter devastation on the border communities of southern Israel. And instead of a world that mourns with us, we find ourselves facing increased security because our bodies are at risk.

Our mourning and our loss have become politicized and dangerous.

There is, of course, plenty to critique about Israel’s subsequent war in Gaza and about the Israeli government. But today, we simply want to mourn and grieve. And we find ourselves in need of protection simply to do so.

I am frustrated by this reality.

I am enraged that Jewish children need additional security to go to school. I am frustrated that mourning the murder of Jews can feel like a political act. I am frustrated that we have to explain why Jewish safety matters, or why this day matters, or why we need the space to grieve.

How do we move forward when our very calendar, our memory, and even the language we use to remember our own disasters have been co-opted and turned upside down?

When the world feels dark, and the Jewish people feel vulnerable and afraid, what can we do?

In the early sixth century BCE, during the Babylonian exile, stay with me, I promise it’s worth it, the prophet Ezekiel prophesied to a people who had witnessed the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple and who feared that their national story had come to an end.

In what is perhaps his most famous prophecy, Ezekiel 37, God shows Ezekiel a valley filled with dry bones. The bones are not anonymous: God tells him explicitly, “these bones are the whole House of Israel.”

They speak for themselves:

וַיֹּאמֶר֮ אֵלַי֒ בֶּן־אָדָ֕ם הָעֲצָמ֣וֹת הָאֵ֔לֶּה כָּל־בֵּ֥ית יִשְׂרָאֵ֖ל הֵ֑מָּה הִנֵּ֣ה אֹמְרִ֗ים יָבְשׁ֧וּ עַצְמוֹתֵ֛ינוּ וְאָבְדָ֥ה תִקְוָתֵ֖נוּ נִגְזַ֥רְנוּ לָֽנוּ׃

“And I was told, ‘O mortal, these bones are the whole House of Israel. They say, “Our bones are dried up, our hope is gone; we are doomed.”’

“Our hope is gone.”

No phrase captures the despair of a people who believed themselves to be finished more powerfully than this one.

And after years of unrelenting war, with havoc wreaked in Israel, Gaza, and Jewish communities throughout the diaspora, we know something of that feeling ourselves. We have, in the words of Mijal Bitton, “entered history” once again.

But Ezekiel does not allow the Jewish people to remain in that place of despair, fear, or grief.

The miracle of the dry bones is not merely that the dead become alive again. It is that a people who believed their collective future had ended are given the possibility of a future.

God says:

וִידַעְתֶּ֖ם כִּֽי־אֲנִ֣י יְהוָ֑ה בְּפִתְחִ֣י אֶת־קִבְרֽוֹתֵיכֶ֗ם וּבְהַעֲלוֹתִ֥י אֶתְכֶ֛ם מִקִּבְרוֹתֵיכֶ֖ם עַמִּֽי׃

“You shall know, O My people, that I am GOD, when I have opened your graves and lifted you out of your graves.”

And then:

וְנָתַתִּ֨י רוּחִ֤י בָכֶם֙ וִחְיִיתֶ֔ם וְהִנַּחְתִּ֥י אֶתְכֶ֖ם עַל־אַדְמַתְכֶ֑ם וִידַעְתֶּ֞ם כִּי־אֲנִ֧י יְהוָ֛ה דִּבַּ֥רְתִּי וְעָשִׂ֖יתִי נְאֻם־יְהוָֽה׃

“I will put My breath into you and you shall live again, and I will set you upon your own soil. Then you shall know that I, GOD, have spoken and have acted declares GOD.”

God breathes new life into us.

The promise is not simply that our circumstances will improve. It is that we can receive new breath that we can become capable of living, rebuilding, and imagining a future again.

But the story becomes even more striking more than two millennia later, when the poet Naftali Herz Imber took up Ezekiel’s language of lost hope.

Imber composed a poem called Tikvatenu in 1878, and over the following years it evolved into the song that would eventually become HaTikvah, the national anthem of the State of Israel. Its opening words deliberately echo Ezekiel:

עוֹד לֹא אָבְדָה תִּקְוָתֵנוּ הַתִּקְוָה הַנּוֹשָׁנָה לָשׁוּב לְאֶרֶץ אֲבוֹתֵנוּ

“Our hope is not yet lost, The ancient hope: To return to the land of our fathers.”

There is something extraordinary happening here.

Ezekiel’s people say, “Our hope is gone.”

Imber takes that same biblical language and answers: “Our hope is not yet lost.”

The transformation continues in the version that became HaTikvah. The original Tikvatenu spoke of “the ancient hope.” Later, Y. L. Matmon-Cohen changed the words to the familiar “the hope that is two thousand years old,” and revised the remainder of the stanza into the anthem we know today:

עוֹד לֹא אָבְדָה תִּקְוָתֵנוּ, הַתִּקְוָה בַּת שְׁנוֹת אַלְפַּיִם, לִהְיוֹת עַם חָפְשִׁי בְּאַרְצֵנוּ, אֶרֶץ צִיּוֹן וִירוּשָׁלַיִם.

“Our hope is not yet lost, the hope that is two thousand years old, to be a free nation in our land, the land of Zion and Jerusalem.”

For me, this is one of the great acts of Jewish cultural memory.

We inherit the language of despair, and then we refuse to let despair have the final word.

And this is what Imber understood: to be a Jew is to work toward hope no matter the circumstances, to choose hope despite fear, grief, and trauma.

We are now called upon to do the same: to create a moral vision for the Jewish people and the Jewish homeland that orients us toward hope, toward rebuilding, and toward renewal.

And perhaps even more simply: to live a thick and deep Jewish life.

Our religious tradition demands nothing less.

And so we return to Ezekiel.

God promises:

וְנָתַתִּ֤י לָכֶם֙ לֵ֣ב חָדָ֔שׁ וְר֥וּחַ חֲדָשָׁ֖ה אֶתֵּ֣ן בְּקִרְבְּכֶ֑ם וַהֲסִרֹתִ֜י אֶת־לֵ֤ב הָאֶ֙בֶן֙ מִבְּשַׂרְכֶ֔ם וְנָתַתִּ֥י לָכֶ֖ם לֵ֥ב בָּשָֽׂר׃

“And I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit into you: I will remove the heart of stone from your body and give you a heart of flesh.”

God promises the possibility of hearts and spirits renewed after disaster the possibility of becoming capable of something other than simply surviving what has happened to us.

Within devastation lies the possibility of renewal.

And then Ezekiel gives us one more image.

He is told to take two sticks: one marked for Judah, the other for Joseph, for Ephraim and the northern tribes of Israel. He is commanded to bring them together:

וְקָרַ֨ב אֹתָ֜ם אֶחָ֧ד אֶל־אֶחָ֛ד לְךָ֖ לְעֵ֣ץ אֶחָ֑ד וְהָי֥וּ לַאֲחָדִ֖ים בְּיָדֶֽךָ׃

“Bring them close to each other, so that they become one stick, joined together in your hand.”

The immediate meaning of Ezekiel’s image is national reunification: the divided houses of Israel, Judah and Joseph, will once again become one people.

But there is something in the image that speaks powerfully to us as well.

The sticks do not become one because they first resolve their differences. They become one because they are brought together and, ultimately, because God holds them together.

This is the deeper charge of these two sticks becoming one in God’s hand: Jewish peoplehood has never depended upon unanimity.

Judah and Ephraim carried different histories and different identities. They had already experienced the consequences of division. Ezekiel’s vision is not of a people made uniform, but of a people reunited.

And perhaps that is what we need to hear now.

We are a people bound not because we see this war, these hostages, or the future of this land in identical terms, but because responsibility for one another does not wait for consensus. And religious obligation is upon all of us.

And being responsible for one another mean celebrating Jewish joy and praying ancient words together. It means learning Torah together and arguing over its meanings. Gathering for smachot and for shared loss being present for Jews at our highest highs and lowest lows. Showing up in the ordinary moments and the sacred ones. It means committing ourselves to a Jewish life rich enough and deep enough to sustain us through moments like this. Doubling down on Jewish practices and rituals, on faith and hope.

Holding the tent together even when we are frightened, even when we profoundly disagree about what comes next is not a failure of unity. It is what being an am, a people, actually asks of us.

Our task is to act as one people inside a tradition replete with wisdom.

We do not control every part of this new reality.

But we can decide what kind of people we will be within it.

We can choose to deepen our Jewish lives. We can choose to show up for one another. We can choose Torah, prayer, mitzvot, community, and connection. We can choose to build a Jewish future that is not defined only by the dangers we face, but by the life we create together.

Od lo avdah tikvateinu.

Our hope is not yet lost.

Not because there is nothing to fear.

Not because the world has suddenly become safe. Quite the opposite.

When we are excluded, when our mourning is diminished and politicized, when our bodies aren’t safe we breath new life into who we truly are, what we believe and how we practice our Judaism.

Because we have a gift, an inherited tradition that teaches us how to breathe new life into one another, how to rebuild after devastation, and how to remain a people no matter the forces within our without that try to divide us.

Our hope is not yet lost because we are still here.

And we are still building.

TEM @ Adas

Last spring, walking home from Adas one Friday night, my daughter Ayla grabbed my hand and placed hers in mine, an increasingly rare occurrence for our budding teenager. “I don’t like walking home on Friday nights,” she whispered. I paused. “Why not?”1

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As regular Shabbat walkers, I had an inkling this wasn’t a run of the mill complaint. “The dark. The kippot. It’s Shabbat, people know it and know we are Jewish — being Jewish is scary now.”

My heart shattered somewhere on Connecticut Avenue and Van Ness Street. You could go find the pieces there still, ground into the pavement. But this story isn’t about my broken heart. It’s about her fear and the response I wish I’d given. What I said was crap. Something like there’s nothing to be afraid of, we are safe and I missed the mark - like I do at least 75% of the time as a parent. Because even if we are, and let’s be honest I am not sure we are, that wasn’t what what she needed from me in that moment.

We are not, most of the time, reasoning creatures who occasionally feel things. We are feeling creatures who occasionally reason.

Before I get to the research, try this. Think of the last time your kid said something to you that stung: maybe unfair, maybe half-true, maybe just badly timed. Or your spouse, mid-argument, brought up something from three years ago that had nothing to do with the dishes you were actually fighting about. Or a parent, in that particular tone only a parent has, questioned a decision you’d already made. Or perhaps closer to home for me a congregant pulled you aside after services with a “quick note” about something you said from the bimah. What happened in your body in that first half-second? Before you said anything in response. I would guess: heat, a tightening, a whizzing in your mind as it drafted the comeback. Whatever came out of your mouth next, measured or sharp, gracious or defensive, came after that first half-second. You didn’t reason your way into feeling defensive and then decide to sound defensive. The feeling showed up first and your words went and found themselves a lawyer.

In 2001, the psychologist Jonathan Haidt published one of the most influential papers in moral psychology, “The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail.” His claim, backed by a body of experiments since: moral judgments arrive quickly and automatically, almost like aesthetic reactions. We feel that something is wrong the way we feel that something is ugly, and only afterward does the reasoning brain get to work, constructing an explanation for a verdict that’s already been reached. He calls this “moral dumbfounding”: people insist an act is wrong, and when every argument they give is dismantled, they still don’t change their minds. The reasoning is downstream of the feeling.

Not every psychologist agrees with the strongest version of Haidt’s claim, but even his critics don’t dispute the finding that started the debate: our first move, in the moment, is almost always emotional. The live argument is only about how much room is left afterward for a reason to talk back. This is our wiring. This is in our biology.

The “amygdala hijack,” a term coined by Daniel Goleman, describes how a perceived threat triggers a fear response that then outruns the slower brain circuits responsible for weighing consequences before we act. And to be clear, the trigger isn’t only fear. The same jolt fires under anger, frustration, humiliation, jealousy, despair any of these primal emotions can hit that same trapdoor before the thinking brain gets a voice. And now, technology has learned to profit from exactly this.The researchers call this “moral contagion,”. The machinery amplifying these raw, real, instinctual emotions has learned, with real precision, exactly which of our instincts to trigger.

{Breath. Pause. Readying for Torah}

In the book of Bamidbar chapter thirteen, twelve men are sent to scout the land God has promised. They go, they see, they come back. And what happens next is not, first and foremost, a story about lying, or a “bad report” which is how the Torah is sometimes understood to describe it.It is, rather, a story about instinctual emotion, in this case fear, finding its way to the front of our story:

וַיְסַפְּרוּ־לוֹ֙ וַיֹּ֣אמְר֔וּ בָּ֕אנוּ אֶל־הָאָ֖רֶץ אֲשֶׁ֣ר שְׁלַחְתָּ֑נוּ וְ֠גַ֠ם זָבַ֨ת חָלָ֥ב וּדְבַ֛שׁ הִ֖וא וְזֶה־פִּרְיָֽהּ׃

Now they recounted to him, they said: We came to the land to which you sent us, and yes, it is flowing with milk and honey, and this is its fruit

כִּֽי־עַ֣ז הָעָ֔ם הַיֹּשֵׁ֖ב בָּאָ֑רֶץ וְהֶֽעָרִ֗ים בְּצֻר֤וֹת גְּדֹלֹת֙ מְאֹ֔ד וְגַם־יְלִדֵ֥י הָֽעֲנָ֖ק רָאִ֥ינוּ שָֽׁם׃

except that powerful are the people that are settled in the land, the cities are fortified, exceedingly large, and also the descendants of Anak did we see there!

The spies don’t invent facts. The land does have giants in it, fortified cities, real danger. We cannot lose sight of this.

The world is an extremely dark place and there are real things to be angry and enraged about, to be panicked over, to be afraid of, and I am sure each of you could name a few in your personal lives, too—existential loneliness, despair, broken relationships. The scouts’ fear isn’t the problem. Giants are giants! How could they not be afraid? But when they return to camp to give their report to the hundreds of thousands of people who had just walked through a split sea, things go awry. The very way they describe the danger they saw is meant to broadcast their feelings. And it works. Within hours, an entire camp falls apart in despair. This is the power of emotions, primal feelings given the time to develop and they spoke in the language of their primal response. And then this is amplified further, Bamidbar 13:32:

וַיֹּצִ֜יאוּ דִּבַּ֤ת הָאָ֙רֶץ֙ אֲשֶׁ֣ר תָּר֣וּ אֹתָ֔הּ אֶל־בְּנֵ֥י יִשְׂרָאֵ֖ל לֵאמֹ֑ר הָאָ֡רֶץ אֲשֶׁר֩ עָבַ֨רְנוּ בָ֜הּ לָת֣וּר אֹתָ֗הּ אֶ֣רֶץ אֹכֶ֤לֶת יוֹשְׁבֶ֙יהָ֙ הִ֔וא וְכׇל־הָעָ֛ם אֲשֶׁר־רָאִ֥ינוּ בְתוֹכָ֖הּ אַנְשֵׁ֥י מִדּֽוֹת׃

So they gave out a public report of the land that they had scouted out to the Children of Israel, saying: The land that we crossed through to scout it out: it is a land that devours its inhabitants; all the people that we saw in its midst are men of great stature,

שָׁ֣ם רָאִ֗ינוּ אֶת־הַנְּפִילִ֛ים בְּנֵ֥י עֲנָ֖ק מִן־הַנְּפִלִ֑ים וַנְּהִ֤י בְעֵינֵ֙ינוּ֙ כַּֽחֲגָבִ֔ים וְכֵ֥ן הָיִ֖ינוּ בְּעֵינֵיהֶֽם׃

for there we saw the giants the Children of Anak, come from the giants we were in our eyes like grasshoppers, and thus were we in their eyes!

The Torah says, “הוֹצִיאוּ דִּבַּת הָאָרֶץ“ they put out a dibbah, an evil report, of the land. The evil report simply meant they exaggerated; they took what they saw and used their words to make things sound much, much worse.

But later, in Devarim, when Moshe retells this story to the next generation, he uses a different word. He says: “וַתֵּרָגְנוּ בְאָהֳלֵיכֶם“ “and you murmured in your tents” (Devarim 1:27). Not a public report. A private murmuring, tent by tent, away from the leader, away from anyone who might interrupt and offer a response.

The commentators read these as two movements: the report, and then the murmuring that multiplied it—no new information, just the same fear passed tent to tent until, by morning, the whole camp is living inside a feeling no single scout could have caused alone.

You know this rhythm. It’s the group chat after the meeting, where one person’s frustration becomes everyone’s. It’s the car ride home from dinner with extended family, replaying a slight until it’s bigger than it was at the table.

Fear, anger, grief, despair, These are honest responses; the land has giants in it. The sin is the response to the emotion, allowed to run wild and spread to others making it not only about your fear but about stoking fear instead of responding to it. Later in that same passage in Devarim, the people, refusing to enter the land, say to Moshe:

“בְּשִׂנְאַת ה‘ אֹתָנוּ הוֹצִיאָנוּ מֵאֶרֶץ מִצְרָיִם“

“It is because God hates us that God took us out of Egypt” (Devarim 1:27).

Let’s read that again. The people who were rescued, carried out of slavery, fed in the wilderness, spoken to from a mountain, conclude, at the deep fear they feel, that they are hated by the very God who redeemed them.

Rashi, quoting the midrash in Sifrei, will not let that stand:

“But God loved you, you are the ones who hated God. As the folk saying goes: what is in your heart toward your friend is what you assume is in his heart toward you.”

That is one of the most quietly devastating lines in the entire Torah commentary. The people do not have evidence that God hates them. What they have is fear and fear needs somewhere to go and the easiest place for it to go? Back out. To everyone else. To God. The danger of these instinctual, amygdala-driven emotions are that they don’t sit still - they multiply. And they confuse our clarity and weaken our strength and resolve.

The Talmud, in Taanit 29a, commenting on this story, remarks:

“And it is written: ‘And the whole congregation raised their voices, and the people wept that night’ (Bamidbar 14:1). Rabba said in the name of Rabbi Yoḥanan: that night was the eve of the Ninth of Av. The Holy One said to them: You wept a weeping for naught, and I will establish for you a weeping for generations.”

The Talmud hones in on the phrase: בְּכִיָּה שֶׁל חִנָּם. Weeping of chinam usually gets translated “for nothing” or “baseless” and if we stop there, the verse sounds like God scolding them for feeling something that wasn’t real: you wept, and you shouldn’t have, because there was nothing to weep about. But chinam also has another sense in rabbinic Hebrew: “free,” as in given away, spent, and getting nothing. Not baseless. Fruitless tears. Tears that go nowhere. A night of weeping that produces no emotional growth or movement. That night, real fear entered the camp and instead of taking their deep emotion to Moshe, to God and into the daylight to face it, to use their resilience or courage or strength to construct a response. The emotion itself grows like wildfire, and spreads into the tents until it became panic with nothing to show for it by morning except more despair. That’s not a night God is condemning for feeling too much. It’s a night God is naming as wasted.

Here’s what’s remarkable though: the scouts could have made a different choice, they could have overcome their amygdala trap. You know how I know? Someone did! Someone else stood in that exact same valley, saw those same fortified cities, and said something else. Calev, in that same chapter, answers the crowd’s rising panic with one verse: “we should go up and take hold of it, for we can surely do it” (13:30). Same data. Same giants. Calev doesn’t deny any of it– he was standing right there, too. He feels the fear and then he chooses a different path. That, I’d suggest, is the whole spiritual project of this day in miniature: not managing what you feel in the first half-second, but what you do with it the half-second after that, and all the moments that follow.

This is a distinction Rav JB Soloveitchik names precisely. In Kol Dodi Dofek, My Beloved Knocks, he distinguishes Adam ha-Goral, the person of fate, from Adam ha-Yeud, the person of destiny. The person of fate has something happen to her and reacts from the outside in. The person of destiny takes that very same blow and asks what it demands of her, what she’s now called to do with it. Same starting material. Different orientation.

The half-second I described earlier tonight: the heat, the tightening, or the mind already drafting the comeback, that’s pure goral. It is not a moral failure. It’s wiring. You don’t get to decide whether it shows up. But does that jolt become a dibah, spoken to make someone else feel just as you do? Does it get murmured in the tent and spread sideways without ever bringing it somewhere it can be answered? Or, like Calev, do you take an honest emotion, a true word of your deeply felt experience and carry the fear, the pain, the despair, the rage, the sadness without handing it the microphone?If you can do that - that’s yeud. That’s the part of you this day is actually asking something of.

Let me be clear: there are real things to be afraid of today, in this moment. Technological change outpacing us. Wars on multiple fronts. Economic uncertainty. Antisemitism rising here and abroad. Violent extremism, including here at home and in Israel where not only do our external enemies commit this violence but so do our fellow Jews. And your own personal fears besides. The list goes on.

“I will establish it for generations.” Not “you will be punished.” Established. Fixed into the architecture of Jewish time itself. One night of ungrounded panic and slander becomes the date both Temples fall on. Centuries of catastrophe orbit that night. A single evening of people letting their fear speak for them becomes, quite literally, the calendar of Jewish grief.

We tend to imagine our worst moments of anger or fear or despair or dread as small, private, contained. A comment. A post. A fight with our beloved. A thing said in the car to our kid. The tradition says: watch how that works. It rarely stays where you put it. It is established for generations. Think for a moment about how many times you had a reaction like this in the past year: an article about the climate, or a display in a book store about Israel, or a fight that cut at your marriage’s hardest issues. In those split second moments when you spiraled into fear or rage; or, like Ayla that night, you felt so afraid you didn’t want to walk home in your own neighborhood. The feelings are all real, all rooted in a world that keeps handing us reasons to feel them. Today, Yom Kippur asks us to consider what we do with these emotions, this I am afraid is the world we now live in - how, as Jews do we respond?

[Pause]

When I close my eyes and breath, which I try to do early and often these days, I can feel Ayla’s hand in mine. And in that pause, the words I wish I’d that night appear. The ones she deserved. Maybe the ones you need to hear too.

Ayla: that fear. That rage. That despair.

They’re real. But you do not have to let them be in charge. They are not, in fact, in charge. Here are three things to help you hold that line:

One. Every morning wake up and say: Modeh ani lefanecha I acknowledge before you, living and eternal Presence, that You have returned my soul to me in compassion, abundant is Your faithfulness. Ayla, your soul is sacred and powerful, a gift from God, who is with you always, offering you compassion and a strength to persevere through even the strongest emotional responses. Let that be your strength, when you don’t have it, to do the hard work, even when you’re afraid. You can move from fear to empowerment. This is what it means to be a Jew of destiny. Take hold of the bounty you have been given, and with God’s grace you will change the world (and your brain).

Two. Every night, before we say the Shema, the last thing we do before we got to bed, we wrap it in the following introduction:

רִבּוֹנוֹ שֶׁל עוֹלָם הֲרֵינִי מוֹחֵל לְכָל־מִי שֶׁהִכְעִיס וְהִקְנִיט אוֹתִי אוֹ שֶׁחָטָא כְנֶגְדִּי

“Master of the world, I forgive anyone who has wronged me in any way; by accident or on purpose, in speech or in deed, in thought or in passing let no one be punished on my account….” And conclude with the phrase, “may the words of my mouth and the intentions of my heart…” End each day the tradition tells us with forgiveness of others and taking responsibility for your errors. When fear, anger, or despair rise in you discipline yourself to first look for your own part in it, be forgiving of others and remember that your words and actions have the power to build worlds or break them. Use them accordingly.

Three. Be like Calev. See what others don’t. Notice the sliver of light in the room. Look for the goodness and the hope already present, and pull them out of the shadows.Insist on lighting the darkness even while fear, anger and despair are still present. Meet other people’s fear with vision and steadiness. Be a person of destiny, not of fate. Our tradition doesn’t ask us to ignore the facts on the ground. It asks us to find the space between the facts and the fear, and in that space, to choose a vision of redemption and repair. Be like Calev, Ayla. Cultivate courage precisely when you are afraid, angry, or in despair. That is what this day is for: to rise above the animal instinct, and be the spark of God in this very messy human world.

If you do all this, Ayla, each and every day, you will morph that fear into a triumph for our people and all of humanity. And perhaps you will guide all of us a little closer to redemption.

G’mar Chatimah Tovah. May we find life in these waning hours.

Of all the challenges facing those new to Judaism, prayer is the hardest. The barriers are real: Jewish prayer is rigid, primarily in Hebrew, theologically demanding, choreographically confusing, and it asks a lot of your time. That may be why, of all the spiritual practices we encourage new Jews to take on, this is the one that sticks the least. “I don’t get it.” “I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be doing or thinking about.” Those are the refrains I hear most.

I was thinking about this recently in the pool, on a day it took six laps to give in to what I was doing. It never really felt good. My stroke was tight, my legs were tired, I was bored out of my mind. But getting out of the pool was a different story. I found myself whistling in the shower, wondering if I could swing by a friend’s place with coffee, she’d been having a hard week. Whatever hormone gets released by exertion was in full effect.

And here the metaphor holds. Prayer isn’t fun. It isn’t always even meaningful. But practiced again and again, even when the water is freezing and you have no idea how you’ll make it through, it’s worth every solitary moment, because when you leave the prayer space, you’ll be surprised by what it’s done to you. Maybe not the first time, or the second, or the fiftieth. But eventually, you’ll leave having become a little different — deeper, kinder, softer. And every so often, somewhere in one of your laps through the siddur, you’ll surface into a moment of awe, or challenge, or gratitude. And probably also have been bored which scientist in my life tell me is good for our brains.

Teshuvah on a Garbage Heap - Parshat Nitzavim

(Based on Rabbi Shai Held’s “Going Deep-Parshat Nitzavim”)

Shabbat Shalom.

If I am honest I have only ever done deep teshuvah once. I have done some repair and a lot of apologizing all sincere and real. All honest and true but teshuvah work is something different.

In the spring of 1998 two very young juniors in college, one from Brandeis and one from Sarah Lawrence respectively, made their way to Mt. Scopus to begin their semester abroad at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Unsuspecting as they were, these two women would make fast friends, even though they were in slightly different programs and came from very different worlds. There was all the usual college antics: crushes and dating, drunken debauchery, ill-conceived travel adventures and much much more. But the unusual part of this friendship was that almost from the moment it began there was a deep spiritual element to it. Profound conversations on God, Torah, Israel and family were happening days into this newfound fast friendship. After Israel, our families were quickly roped in with visits to our childhood homes, celebration of holidays together and so much more. It was as if these two people had been destined to meet and become friends by some higher power.

As happens in friendships, following that semester they remained close through senior year and then stopped speaking. I wish I could say physical distance was to blame one party went to Israel and one to NY, but the distance wasn’t simply geographic, the physical oceans didn’t divide us, it was one covered by oceans of hurt. Mistakes were made. Big ones, ones that fractured the love, trust and connection that had quickly but deeply developed. And for years these two beloved friends didn’t speak. It was painful and sad and overwhelming. And there were attempts at half-hearted reconnections in Israel during rabbinical school, for example, but they always fell short. The gap of hurt and sadness was too deep and wide. It felt too hard to repair.

The Book of Devarim, as it reaches close to its conclusion, imagines a moment when after a devastating separation and exile when the people will return to Torah and thus to God:

וְאַתָּ֣ה תָשׁ֔וּב וְשָׁמַעְתָּ֖ בְּק֣וֹל יְהוָ֑ה וְעָשִׂ֙יתָ֙ אֶת־כָּל־מִצְוֺתָ֔יו אֲשֶׁ֛ר אָנֹכִ֥י מְצַוְּךָ֖ הַיּֽוֹם׃

You, however, will again heed GOD and obey all the commandments that I enjoin upon you this day.

וְהוֹתִֽירְךָ֩ יְהוָ֨ה אֱלֹהֶ֜יךָ בְּכֹ֣ל ׀ מַעֲשֵׂ֣ה יָדֶ֗ךָ בִּפְרִ֨י בִטְנְךָ֜ וּבִפְרִ֧י בְהֶמְתְּךָ֛ וּבִפְרִ֥י אַדְמָתְךָ֖ לְטוֹבָ֑ה כִּ֣י ׀ יָשׁ֣וּב יְהוָ֗ה לָשׂ֤וּשׂ עָלֶ֙יךָ֙ לְט֔וֹב כַּאֲשֶׁר־שָׂ֖שׂ עַל־אֲבֹתֶֽיךָ׃

And the ETERNAL your God will grant you abounding prosperity in all your undertakings, in your issue from the womb, the offspring of your cattle, and your produce from the soil. For GOD will return to delight in your well-being as in that of your ancestors.

Parashat Nitzavim uses the root shuv, return, seven times in these ten verses, moving in what is referred to as a chiastic structure. Israel acts twice, God acts twice, Israel acts again. A relationship of what the Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann calls “unrestrained mutuality” all rooted in the ideas that the returning that happens is between people, often two of us and God.

And then four stunning verses follow:

כִּ֚י הַמִּצְוָ֣ה הַזֹּ֔את אֲשֶׁ֛ר אָנֹכִ֥י מְצַוְּךָ֖ הַיּ֑וֹם לֹֽא־נִפְלֵ֥את הִוא֙ מִמְּךָ֔ וְלֹ֥א רְחֹקָ֖ה הִֽוא׃ לֹ֥א בַשָּׁמַ֖יִם הִ֑וא לֵאמֹ֗ר מִ֣י יַעֲלֶה־לָּ֤נוּ הַשָּׁמַ֙יְמָה֙ וְיִקָּחֶ֣הָ לָּ֔נוּ וְיַשְׁמִעֵ֥נוּ אֹתָ֖הּ וְנַעֲשֶֽׂנָּה׃ וְלֹֽא־מֵעֵ֥בֶר לַיָּ֖ם הִ֑וא לֵאמֹ֗ר מִ֣י יַעֲבָר־לָ֜נוּ אֶל־עֵ֤בֶר הַיָּם֙ וְיִקָּחֶ֣הָ לָּ֔נוּ וְיַשְׁמִעֵ֥נוּ אֹתָ֖הּ וְנַעֲשֶֽׂנָּה׃ כִּֽי־קָר֥וֹב אֵלֶ֛יךָ הַדָּבָ֖ר מְאֹ֑ד בְּפִ֥יךָ וּבִֽלְבָבְךָ֖ לַעֲשֹׂתֽוֹ׃ רְאֵ֨ה נָתַ֤תִּי לְפָנֶ֙יךָ֙ הַיּ֔וֹם אֶת־הַֽחַיִּ֖ים וְאֶת־הַטּ֑וֹב וְאֶת־הַמָּ֖וֶת וְאֶת־הָרָֽע׃

For this mitzvah that I command you today: it is not too extraordinary for you, it is not too far away! It is not in the heavens, [for you] to say: Who will go up for us to the heavens and get it for us and have us hear it, that we may observe it? And it is not across the sea, [for you] to say: Who will cross for us, across the sea, and get it for us and have us hear it, that we may observe it? Rather, near to you is this thing, exceedingly, in your mouth and in your heart, to observe it! See, I set before you today life and good, and death and evil.

Most modern scholars read “the thing” here as the whole book of Devarim, the entirety of the prescription for life laid out in this final book, close enough to follow if you choose to. But most traditional commentaries insist this refers to a single mitzvah: teshuvah. “Ki karov hu” the thing that is close to you, that is possible, that is right there for you: teshuvah. Repair. Ramban, Nachmanides (1194–1270), suggests that God wants Israel to remember that even in the very depths of exile, teshuvah is “not too hard,” such that you can do it at any time and in any place (Rabbi Shai Held, Nitzavim “Going Deep)

These commentators insist that the Torah’s simple language “you will return and heed God’s voice... and God will grant you abounding prosperity, and the thing is close to you” means not only that teshuvah is accessible, but that it is utterly simple. As long as you are invested in the project of repair and return, it will work. But for most of us, the simplicity by which the Torah describes this repair and return is laudable, even desired, but not connected to our real-life experience of the work of this season. Teshuvah is anything but easy or simple.

Rabbi Shalom Noach Berezovsky (1911–2000), known as the Slonimer Rebbe, in his ninth essay on teshuvah, writes:

אכן הגישה בזה צריכה להיות ברורה, כי תפקיד האדם הוא עד׳׳מ לבונה בית מפואר על מקום אשפה, שאם אינו רוצה להקשיע כספים ויגיעה לחפור יסודות עמודקים ומוצקים, אין לבנין הזה תשתית חזקה ולכן תמיד מתהווים סדקים בקירות הבית, ובכל פעם יש להקשיע מחדש הרבה הוצאות לחיזוק הבנין, ואעפ׳׳כ אין לזה תועלת ממשית, כי שוב יתגלו בקיעים נוספים, והבית תמיד בסכנת התמוטטות. ורק דרך אחת לפניו, שיהיה לו אומץ לב להרוס את כל מבנה הבית ולחפור יסודות עמוקים וחזקים ועליו יבנה ויכונן בנין חזק. כמ׳׳כ היא מסכת התשובה. אם כי האדם מכניס בכל שנה תיקונים ושיפורים במבנה ביתו הרוחני, אך כאשר אין זה בנוי על יסודות חזקים, הרי בכל שנה נבקעים בקיעים וסדקים, וביתו הרוחני עומד בפני התמוטטות. רק כאשר יגיע למצב שיהיה לו אומץ ויבין כי כל אלו התיקונים לא יפתרו את בעית חייו, עדי יחפור יסודות עמוקים, ויעקור ראשית את השורש פורה ראש ולענה, אז יהיה בנין עדי עד. בהילוך מחשבה זה צריך יהודי לגשת לתשובה... לחפור יסודות חזקים לביתו הרוחני, שיעמדו בפני כל נסיונות החיים, לוא יתרועע היסוד ולא יפול הבנין.

Indeed, the approach to this must be clear: a person’s task is, by way of example, is like one building a magnificent house on a garbage dump. If he is unwilling to spend money and effort digging deep, solid foundations, this building will have no strong base, and cracks will constantly form in the walls of the house, requiring him to spend great sums again and again to reinforce it with no real benefit, since new fissures will only appear, and the house will always be in danger of collapse. Only one path lies before him: to have the courage to tear down the entire structure and dig deep, strong foundations and upon those to build and establish a sturdy building.

So too is the process of teshuvah. Even though a person makes repairs and improvements every year to the structure of her spiritual house, when it is not built on strong foundations, fissures and cracks break open again every year, and her spiritual house stands on the verge of collapse. Only when she has the courage to understand that all these repairs will not solve the problem of her life until she digs deep and uproots, first and foremost, the root that “bears gall and wormwood” only then will the building stand forever. It is with this train of thought that a Jew must approach teshuvah... foundations that will hold firm against all of life’s trials, so that the foundation is never shattered, and the building never collapses.

Here I would like to return to the story of the two friends. If you haven’t already figured it out, the two women are me and your beloved Rabbi Holtzblatt. Many years ago, shortly after my family and I moved here to DC, she asked if we could have lunch during Elul. We had seen each other since I’d arrived brunch at her house, at shul but the gulf stood there, pregnant with unrealized possibility. We were still sitting on the Slonimer Rebbe’s trash heap. We met at Spices for Sushi just down the street. She asked for a table in the corner, which I didn’t fully understand at the time. I do not remember what I ate, which is a rarity for me, but I remember exactly what she said: “I want a friendship again, and I think before we can, we need to do teshuvah. I am a different person, I think you are too, and I want to do the work so we can find one another as these new people.” What followed was hard to hear and required saying and admitting hard things. Hurtful things. And even harder still was sorting out how to be vulnerable and trusting and trustworthy again. Thus began what I think of as our friendship 2.0, the one in which we still reside.

So what do we do with these two seemingly contradictory teachings? The Torah tells us teshuvah is close, karov. And the Slonimer Rebbe tells us it requires tearing a house down to its foundation. That hardly sounds close. The contrast belies their symbiosis. “Ki karov hu” is not a claim about ease it’s a claim about access to a relationship. The word karov shares its root with korban, sacrifice: hakravah, the act of drawing near. The Slonimer’s house teardown, in this light, is not a hurdle it is an act of drawing ourselves near to the best version of ourselves, one that is fundamentally strong and good. This work, done in the Torah’s vision of it, is a transformation, not a tweak. It is easy in life to avoid this work. It is easier still to simple live without much deep work on the self and the relationships that are broken. That is where most of what to live but closeness only comes with sacrifice and drawing near and you can only do that when you tear down what has covered up. To build anew get at the rooted brokenness.

That lunch at Spices wasn’t a tweak. It wasn’t a nice conversation, a better patch on an old crack. It did not feel great in the moment. I remember feeling uncomfortable and afraid and awkward. Rabbi Holtzblatt didn’t ask to smooth things over she asked whether we could become, together, two new people. I am a different person, I think you are too. And she was asking for hakravah for both of us to draw close to our wrong, our sins, our pain, and the pain we caused one another. It had been close the whole time, the way the Torah insists it always is, we were through those half hearted connections standing a few feet apart on the Slonimer’s trash heap, because the capacity for that nearness was never out of reach. It only required us to be willing to dig, and then to draw close.

This is why the verse doesn’t say the mitzvah is close. It says the thing ha-davar is close: a capacity, potentiality. Ki karov eilecha ha-davar me’od, b’ficha u’vilvavcha la’asoto. Close enough to hold in your mouth and your heart. Close enough, this year, to actually draw near. The simpler choice is to skirt those deep dark and hard issues. To live in the everyday in the moment and ignore that which is broken in the hopes the problems will go away, will be covered up by the everyday. We can do this easily and what we will be doing is standing tall on a trash heap. But if we want to fix what is broken we have to start deep down and transform. Why do I act this way, where does it come from, why did I hurt you, why did you hurt me? And once we find that root we can build it back stronger.

May this be a year we have the courage to demolish what needs demolishing, dig down to the root, and draw close to God, to ourselves, to the people we’ve let drift to the far away ki karov hu they are so much closer than we think, at the bottom of the trash heap, wholeness and love. Shabbat Shalom.

Imagine, for a moment, you are the National Mall.

You have stood here for well over a century. You have watched every generation of this country walk your length, some to celebrate, some to protest, some just to visit with their kids on a summer trip or in our case, as residents of this city, just popping in on a break from a bike ride. And every single one of them, whether they knew it or not, came to you to be told a story.

Start at one end. The Lincoln Memorial doesn’t simply hold a man in marble, it holds his words. Carved into the very walls are the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural. You don’t just come to see Lincoln. You come to read what he said, in his own language, permanently inscribed, because the facade itself insists: don’t just remember the person, remember the story he told about the country he believed in. Walk a little further. The Jefferson Memorial does the same thing. The Declaration itself, its actual words, wrapped around the dome. Further still, the King Memorial: his own sentences, cut into stone, so that anyone standing there isn’t just looking at a man, they’re being handed an argument about what America owes to people it once excluded.

Even the one monument on this Mall that seems, at first, to break the pattern, the obelisk at the center, tall, plain, nearly wordless, even that one, if you go inside, is lined with commemorative stones from across the country, each one adding its own small piece to the story of how this thing got built.

Every monument on this Mall is doing the same work: it is not simply marking that something happened. It is telling you why it happened, and this is the important part, it is telling you as if you, too, are part of what happens next. (Based on R’ Sacks’s teaching on Ki Tavo)

The great rabbi and public intellectual, z”l, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks had a name for what’s happening here he called it a covenant-society. And he distinguished that from a traditional society, like Sacks’ own England.

To understand, travel with me across the ocean for a moment. In Parliament Square in London stands a statue of Winston Churchill, bronze, leaning on his cane, unmistakable. And on it: no words. Not one line of the speeches that are arguably why Britain still stands as it does. No “we shall fight on the beaches.” No “their finest hour.” Just the man himself, standing, needing no caption, as if everyone who walks past already knows, and always will, and the statue’s only job is to remind you that he was there.

Which is strange, if you think about it. Of all the people you’d expect a monument to quote, it would be Churchill, a man who talked his way through a war. And yet: nothing. Not because Britain forgot what he said. Because Britain doesn’t feel it needs to keep saying it.

That’s the difference. When Rabbi Sacks draws this distinction between a traditional society and a covenant society, he quotes the philosopher Roger Scruton, who said that in a traditional society like England, “things at home don’t need an explanation because they are home. They are there because they are there.”

But in a covenant society, a nation’s past isn’t just there. Those places aren’t valued because they’re old, remembering the past has a purpose. It’s because those events created the collective determination to build a community, a society. Covenant societies exist to honor a pledge, a moral commitment, and that’s why the story has to be told to successive generations, to new immigrants. Everyone has to buy into that story. That is what makes you an American. Not because your family came over on the Mayflower or at Ellis Island, not your race, not your religion. You are American because you commit to this story, our unique story, and to the values it teaches. You hold its lessons as a picture of who we are, and who we want to become. And it isn’t only the monuments listen to President LBJ’s 1965 inaugural address:

“They came here the exile and the stranger, brave but frightened to find a place where a man could be his own man. They made a covenant with this land. Conceived in justice, written in liberty, bound in union, it was meant one day to inspire the hopes of all humankind. And it binds us still. If we keep its terms we shall flourish…”

We tell the stories of our triumphs and our mistakes because they all coalesce to tell our beautifully imperfect narrative.

Now, finally, turn to this week’s parsha, because it turns out Torah figured this out a very long time before Washington had a monument to anyone.

Chapter 26 of Devarim imagines a farmer in the land of Israel, at harvest time, not war, not exile, not hardship. The good years. The land has done exactly what it was promised to do. He fills a basket with the first fruits of everything that grew: grapes, figs, pomegranates, wheat, and he carries it up to Jerusalem.

He doesn’t set the basket down himself. He hands it to whoever is serving as kohen that day and he says,

“”הִגַּדְתִּי הַיּוֹם לַה‘ אֱלֹהֶיךָ כִּי־בָאתִי אֶל־הָאָרֶץ אֲשֶׁר נִשְׁבַּע ה‘ לַאֲבֹתֵינוּ לָתֶת לָנוּ“

“I declare today to Adonai your God that I have come into the land which Adonai swore to our fathers to give us.”

Then he lets go of the basket. The Kohen takes it from his hands and sets it before the altar.

This is, by any measure, his moment. This is the harvest he grew, on the land he holds, by his own labor. If there were ever a moment for a man to stand quietly with what’s his and let it speak for itself, the way Churchill’s statue does, the way a traditional society does, this would be it.

But Torah does not let him do that. The kohen sets the basket down before the altar and the farmer is not finished. He has one more thing to say. Not about this harvest, not about this land he’s standing on, but about where his people came from. He is about to recite the story. He’s already given up the fruit. His hands are empty. And still, before he can say a single word of thanks, the Torah tells him: וְעָנִיתָ וְאָמַרְתָּ...

“and you shall answer, and say.” Not simply speak. The root ענה is not conversational speech, but formal response: testimony, an answer given as if under oath, or in reply to something. This is the register Torah reaches for elsewhere for sworn declarations and formal communal proclamation including, later in this same parsha, the whole nation answering “amen” at Gerizim and Eival. A testimony to his own history, his people’s story. And what is that story?

“אֲרַמִּי אֹבֵד אָבִי“ my father was a wandering, near-perishing man. No land. No standing. “וַיֵּרֶד מִצְרַיְמָה“ he goes down to Egypt. “וַיָּרֵעוּ אֹתָנוּ הַמִּצְרִים וַיְעַנּוּנוּ“ the Egyptians dealt harshly with us, and afflicted us. “וַנִּצְעַק אֶל ה‘” we cried out. And God heard.

This story telling is shocking when you think about what is happening. He doesn’t first talk about gratitude (he will get there), he does not talk about Mt Sinai but goes straight for the worst part of our story. The part we insist on reciting every year at our Pesach Sedarim. He goes for the lowest of lowest, when were in the worst circumstance. In this best moment his story is one of narrowness, of wandering. And here the rabbis ask a fascinating question? What if the person standing there wasn’t born into this story at all, what if he’s a convert, someone who chose this people but isn’t descended from that father? Can he really say “arami oved avi,” my father was a wandering Aramean, if he isn’t native to this story?

The straightforward reading by the Mishnah says: no. הַגֵּר מֵבִיא וְאֵינוֹ קוֹרֵא the convert brings, but does not recite. He brings the basket. He stays silent for this part.

But Maimonides and the standing halacha? It ruled otherwise. הַגֵּר מֵבִיא וְקוֹרֵא the convert brings, and recites, the whole declaration, every word, because anyone who joins this people inherits this story. It becomes theirs, in all ways.

Which tells you something about what this speech was always doing. It was never really a genealogy. It was an invitation to claim a story as your own, whether or not it happened to you.

And only then, only after all of that has been said out loud, does the farmer arrive at the words: “וְעַתָּה הִנֵּה“ and now, behold. And now, behold, I have brought the first of the fruit of the ground which You, God, have given me.

Sit with those two words for a second: וְעַתָּה הִנֵּה v’atah, hineh. And now, behold.

Every verb before this point in the declaration is in the past tense. This is the one word in the entire declaration that describes anything happening in real time.

Which means the farmer isn’t allowed to open with it. He doesn’t get to walk up to the kohen and simply say, “Here is my harvest, thank You.” It only arrives after nine verses of someone else’s hardship have been spoken first. The Torah is quite literally making him earn his own tense.

Say it before this moment and the farmer is just a man admiring his own harvest. Say it in the order Torah insists on then, at length, and only after that, now and the same fruit means something else entirely: not what I made, but what I was finally given, after having nothing.

Notice what the Torah just did. At the exact moment this man’s ownership of the land feels most obvious, most earned, most simply his, Torah interrupts him and makes him say, in public, in front of a kohen: this was not always so. I did not make this. I could still be nothing.

Notice what this chapter has actually done to him. It didn’t just let him tell a story. It made him become answerable for one.

Higgadti, I declare. V’anita, he testifies, under oath. And finally, the one formula we haven’t yet mentioned he’emarta, he’emircha he pledges, and is pledged to in return. Three times, three registers, and by the end he is no longer a man who happens to know his own history. He is a man who has sworn to it, publicly, and can be held to what he swore.

That’s what a covenant rooted in story actually costs. Not sentiment. Obligation. Once you’ve said arami oved avi out loud, you don’t get to un-know where you came from. You’re on the hook for it.

And it’s a three-fold hook. You’re on the hook to the story itself which means telling it honestly, the wandering and the slavery included, not just the harvest. Ignore the hard parts and you’re not passing down a covenant, you’re passing down a brand. You’re on the hook to God because he’emarta, he’emircha means God bound God’s own self to you in the same breath you bound yourself to God; what your people does with that pledge is no longer only your business. And you’re on the hook to whoever isn’t standing where you’re standing yet the ger, the stranger, the vulnerable, the newcomer, whoever’s story hasn’t been told to them as many times as yours has been told to you because a people that hoards its own covenant has already started breaking it.

This is not a light thing to inherit. It was never meant to be. Chapter 26 goes on, after this, to make its biggest claim yet: that a people who take on all three of these obligations become something more, an am segulah - a people set apart as God’s treasure not by who we inherently are but by telling our story, choosing to be bound to it and being responsible for including others in it. May we merit to be worthy of this legacy.

Shabbat Shalom.

Shabbat Chol Ha’Moed Pesach 5786 (Adas Israel)

April 4th, 2026-19 Nissan 5786

Shabbat Shalom. Mo’adim L’Simcha.

It was 7:45 am. “No, you are going with Imma.” “I will be bored.” “You will be bored at home too — get dressed for shul put on a kippah, she needs to leave and, it’s time to go.” And very soon I was walking to shul with one of our kids, en route to teach one Shabbat morning not long ago. The walk is one mile and we do it every week, and it can feel very long or very short even though the mileage is exactly the same. Mostly I wanted to ponder my coffee and my teaching, but instead as we walked he had other ideas.

As a child I walked to shul a lot with my father — rain, sun, hot sun, or snow. Those walks were formative. As we reached Connecticut and Van Ness, he said, ”Imma, I mean you’re smart, right — Egypt, it did not really happen, right?” So it goes for my pondering my class I thought.

Today we are gathered in this in-between space, between the two great Seder nights and the end of the holiday, sitting, as it were, inside the story.

I want to ask this morning a question I had to ask myself on that walk: when does the story of Egypt actually begin? Because to answer a question of truth you have to know the topic at hand.

If we carefully read the Torah’s telling of it, there is something genuinely startling. When it begins, we are still in Egypt. The plagues are still falling. The Israelites are still slaves, still rising before dawn to make bricks, still subject to the whip and the taskmaster. Pharaoh has not released anyone. The sea has not yet split. And God turns to Moshe and Aharon in Chapter 12:

לֵ֣יל שִׁמֻּרִ֥ים הוּא֙ לַֽיהֹוָ֔ה לְהוֹצִיאָ֖ם מֵאֶ֣רֶץ מִצְרָ֑יִם הֽוּא־הַלַּ֤יְלָה הַזֶּה֙ לַֽיהֹוָ֔ה שִׁמֻּרִ֛ים לְכׇל־בְּנֵ֥י יִשְׂרָאֵ֖ל לְדֹרֹתָֽם׃

“It is a night of keeping-watch for Adonai, to bring them out of the land of Egypt; that is this night for Adonai, a keeping-watch of all the Children of Israel, throughout their generations.”

The Torah goes on: take a lamb. Slaughter it on the fourteenth. Roast it. Eat it with matzah and bitter herbs, your loins girded, your sandals on your feet, your staff in your hand — eat it in haste. And then — v’higadta l’vincha — you shall tell your children. Tell them what God did for you when you left Egypt.

Before freedom. Before the sea. Before the desert. Before Sinai.

Celebrate now. Tell the story now. On the 14th of Nissan.

This is the Torah’s opening move in the drama of Pesach — not the splitting of the sea, not the thunder at Sinai, but this: a people still in chains, commanded to act as if they are already free. Three commandments — korban pesach, matzah, and maror — given in the thick of slavery, that together form the deepest statement Judaism makes about what faith actually is.

The Israelites are commanded to take a lamb — notably the animal sacred to the Egyptians — and slaughter it publicly. To mark their doorposts with its blood. To roast it whole, in the night, and eat it standing, dressed and ready to leave, table manners not withstanding. This is not a quiet, private act of prayer. This is a declaration — a visible, embodied national commitment to a reality that has not yet arrived.

Think about the courage that took. Egypt surrounds them. Pharaoh has not yet relented. And yet they are asked not to believe privately in their hearts, not to hope quietly in their souls — but to do something, to stake a claim in the physical world, with their hands and their roasting fires and their doorposts, that the God of Israel is about to act on their behalf.

The Ramban, in his final commentary to Parshat Bo, writes that the entire purpose of the Pesach mitzvot is not simply to record a historical event. It is to establish, in the bone and sinew of the Jewish people, a living knowledge of God’s presence and power in the world. The Pesach offering is not a memorial. It is a covenant act. You do this, and in doing it, you become the kind of people who can be redeemed.

And then what? Once you do this what do you do with this potential redemption?

In almost the same breath, the Torah answers — v’higadta l’vincha — you shall tell your children. Teach them that faith is not an archaeological claim about historical truth. It is a posture of behaviors that requires a merging of time, acts of communal commitment, and celebration of the possibility that the world will be redeemed.

Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch makes an observation that is revolutionary. The word v’higadta, he writes, does not simply mean verbal recitation. Its root — N-G-D, neged, face to face — carries the sense of making something present to another person. V’higadta means making clear not merely by words but by deeds, by actions. To demonstrate. To show. To bring something into the lives of your children, grandchildren to the children of this community by how you live.

This reframes everything. The Haggadah is not just a book you read. It is a thing you do. The matzah on the table, the bitter herbs, the reclining, the four cups, the open door — these are not illustrations of the story. They are the telling. We show our children freedom by being free people in front of them. Before we are actually free.

This is the genius of Pesach as the manifestation of faith. Judaism does not say: believe this happened, and then act accordingly. It says: act this, and the believing will follow. The faith is not the precondition for the practice. The practice generates and sustains the faith.

Which brings us to what may be the most demanding teaching of all.

The Mishnah in Pesachim says this in its own way: bechol dor vador chayav adam lirot et atzmo k’ilu hu yatza miMitzrayim — in every generation, a person is obligated to see themselves as if they personally left Egypt.

Not to remember that their ancestors left. Not to feel gratitude on behalf of people who lived long ago. To see yourself as if you left. Present tense. First person. This night. This body. This life.

This is an almost impossible demand, because we are all still constricted — bound up in suffering we are fighting or will fight, a narrowness our neighbors know about and the ones they don’t. And the world is so clearly unredeemed that we cannot, must not pretend otherwise. But this is the heart of everything. The Mishnah is not asking for a correct historical re-telling. Not an archeological tell of truth. It is asking for existential re-entry. Every year, we step back into the moment before the sea splits — when freedom is commanded but not yet arrived — and choose, again, to act as if it is already real.

This is what enacted faith looks like. Not certainty, then action. Action as faith.

But if that is true — if mitzvot are the form faith takes — then we need to ask the harder question. If freedom is the goal, why does leaving Egypt lead straight to Sinai and all those commandments? Why does liberation come bundled with obligation?

Here I want to turn briefly and finally to the founders of this country and what they understood, three thousand years later, from a very different tradition. John Adams wrote that the American Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people, wholly inadequate to govern any other. His argument was not about religion in the public square. It was about the interior formation of a free people. A constitution — any structure of freedom — cannot sustain itself through external enforcement alone. If the people who live under it do not carry within themselves a moral compass deeper than law, freedom collapses into license.

They arrived, from the outside, at what the rabbis had always known from within: you cannot sustain liberty from the outside in. Freedom must be enacted from the inside out. A free people must be a formed people — shaped by memory, by practice, by obligations they carry not because they are forced to, but because they have internalized them as constitutive of who they are as an am a people.

This is what the ol malchut shamayim — the yoke of heaven — actually means. A yoke is not a cage. A yoke is what connects two beings pulling in the same direction. To take on the yoke of heaven is to say: I am in relationship with something larger than myself, and that relationship has expectations — and those expectations are not what constrain my freedom. They are what make it real and durable.

Which is precisely why we celebrate Pesach before redemption happens.

“What do you think?” I asked him, as we crested Sedgwick Street. “That’s so annoying Imma, when you ask me a question back — just answer me!”

“Historical accurate? No, I don’t think it happened the way the Torah describes. But is it true? Really deeply true — teaching with every word, every mitzvah, every deed, every ritual — how to live our lives, how to be Jewish in relationship to God and the Jewish people? How to lead us to redemption? To freedom? To build something together? Yep I think it is the truest thing we have.

Shabbat Shalom and Moadim L’Simcha.

I sent my wife a text. I send her many texts a day, but this one read:
“Here are the passwords to all of my social media accounts. They’re gibberish for a reason. I’m deleting this text.”

And I did.

I didn’t delete the accounts themselves. I have too many photos I love, and a handful of professional posts I wanted to keep. I wasn’t trying to erase my past. I just wanted out of the social media world.

It wasn’t one dramatic moment that pushed me there. It was death by a thousand tiny posts.

The New Year has a way of clarifying things. As a clergy person, it’s easy to preach a certain kind of life. It is much harder to live it. Rosh Hashanah confronts us with the uncomfortable insistence that our lives are finite, that our time is fragile, that at any moment the book could close. If I really believe that—and I say that I do—then I had to ask myself a very basic question:

What was I doing with my attention?

Once I asked it honestly, the answer wasn’t complicated.

The platforms are manipulative by design. That’s not a hot take; it’s their business model.

I was spending hours looking at photos and posts from people who weren’t actually my friends or my community, people I didn’t really know. Instead of feeling connected, I felt a strange, voyeuristic pleasure that asked nothing of me and created no real relationship in return.

I watched colleagues post sermons or reflections and then get met with performative cruelty in the comments.

I wrote things I hoped might influence others, sharpen a moral argument, shift a perspective and slowly realized that almost never happened.

I noticed myself scrolling constantly. On my phone. On my computer. Even after I removed the apps. I caught myself paying attention to an exercise guru or a famous chef while lying next to my kids as they fell asleep at night.

And all of this sat in deep tension with the life I claim to stand for.

I preach a Torah of local community. Of responsibility. Of covenant and obligation. I ask the people I serve to double down on the slow, unglamorous work of building deep Jewish life right here in Washington, DC. And yet I was pouring my most precious resource—attention—into a screen that reliably delivered outrage or dopamine, but almost never delivered holiness, relationship, or responsibility.

I had my excuses ready.
“My career.”
“My photos and memories.”
“What if I miss something important in someone’s life?”

Eventually, I had to confront the story I was telling myself.

What I was really afraid of missing were moments in the lives of people who weren’t actually in my life. The people who are my friends, my community—I know what’s happening with them. I see them. I talk to them. I show up. We live alongside one another, sometimes literally, sometimes through phone calls, voice notes, and visits that require actual effort.

Judaism has a word for this kind of life: peoplehood. Not audience. Not followers. Not content consumers. A people bound by presence, responsibility, and mutual obligation.

At first, the addiction was real. I felt restless. A little unmoored. I reached for my phone without thinking. I felt oddly lost.

And then something unexpected happened.

My life got much, much smaller.

And that, I’ve come to believe, is the point.

My words of Torah were heard by the people I actually serve—and that was enough. The birthdays I celebrated were with people I see regularly. The stories I carry now come from friends I actually talk to. I have no idea what’s going on in any Peloton instructor’s life right now. My workouts are still fire (as my son would say). I just don’t spend my time watching strangers plant gardens or renovate houses.

I know the pushback already. Social media can be a tool. It can spread Torah. It can connect people across distance. All of that is true.

But tools shape the people who use them.

And for me, this one was quietly training me to value breadth over depth, reaction over responsibility, and visibility over presence. It was pulling me away from the very culture and community I claim to care most about.

I did, however, go see my brother’s new house. It’s only a few miles away.

And you know what?

It’s lovely.

And so, it turns out, 6 months in to this experiment, is life fits back inside the limits Judaism has been insisting on all along. It is not grand and the impact might be small but I feel more rooted and less aimless. And I hope those I am connected to in real life feel my presence more.

One of the masters of the mystical tradition is on a long journey. He stops at an inn for the night and enters with two peasants tired from selling their wears on their own travels. He follows them in and watches them get drunk. As they become intoxicated and one says to his friend, “Ivan, tell me do you love me?” The other responds, “We have been drinking partners since we were young how could you even ask that?” So the first responds, “So Ivan, then tell me what causes me pain?” Ivan says, “I don’t know what causes you pain, how would I know that I only know what causes me pain.” So the first man responds, “if you loved me you would know what causes me pain.” (Rabbi Moshe Leib Erblich of Sassov 1745-1807, Poland)

To really love someone is to know what causes them pain, what gives them joy, what keeps them awake at night, what are their fears, their aspirations, their most desperate hopes. To love means to reach out to others, to transcend our own limits so we become an enhanced version of ourselves in which inside of our own reality, our own emotional life are other people, are the pain and joy of those we love. When we forget this we sin, we miss out, loose the opportunity to be present for others in this way.

Rabbi Simcha Bunim, teaches: What is our real cheyt, our real sin?

It’s not all the stuff we do. All the errors we commit.

Rather, our real transgression is that, at every moment, we have the opportunity to turn toward the best version of ourselves by turning toward other people’s needs and we don’t

Consider all those lost moments, [pause]those moments in which you did not reach out, or up, or in, moments when you didn’t actively seek kedushah, holiness.

According to Rabbi Simcha, those frighteningly many moments are what cause the great spiritual crises, the moments of “sin”. So perhaps the definition of “sin” would be: lost opportunity.

On the precipice of Yom Kippur pause for a moment and ask yourself: whose pain do you need to pay better attention to and take one step toward them.

Almost 8 years ago I got home one night after work to relieve our babysitter. As I crested the door of our apartment building at the time my phone vibrated alerting me to a text message - it was the babysitter and our youngest was crying and calling for me and she was having trouble consoling him. I rushed upstairs and put down my bag but did not stop to go to the bathroom or change out of my work clothes or eat dinner. I took him in my arms mouthed thank you and goodbye to her and promptly took him back to his room to lay down with him. It took a long time to get him back down (thanks sleep regression) and in the meanwhile I realized our older son was standing next to me staring at me. “What’s wrong buddy,” I whispered. When he told me what he needed help with I realized there was no way to help him. I couldn’t get up the baby was holding my hand tightly and not yet asleep, if I tried to help the older one crying and screaming would ensue from the younger. I quietly said to E, “here’s what to do” and give him instructions. To his credit he quietly attended to what needed doing and found his way into the guest bedroom and went to sleep lights shining brightly. As I lay there for another 30 minutes I had one of those painful parenting moments and not because I really needed to go to the bathroom or eat something though that was happening too.

I wonder to myself what will our kids remember about this time? Will they remember the days and evenings of adventures the we meticulously thought through, planned and executed so their days would joyful and playful? Or will they remember the times we lost our tempers and were impatient? Will they remember they we were trying hard to juggle career and family? Or will they remember the babysitters and the early mornings spent with my computer open? Will they remember that they had new shoes or backpacks or school supplies when they needed them? Or will they remember the rushing and running? Will they remember that we laid with them at night when they were sad or scared? Or will they remember I wanted them to sleep in their own darn beds? Will they remember the myriads of appointments and logistics we managed so they were cared for? Or the times we forgot? Will they remember that we played legos with them for hours or our 100’s of park and playground outings? Or will they remember the times I said we are just staying home too much to do? Will they remember all the fights, the name calling and tears, disappointments, anger or will they remember the love, care and joy?

Why is this such a feature of this season - to call upon זכר - memory? Remember us for good, remember the moments you caught is in an act of kindness or even better remember us for our ancestors goodness. Give us credit, even maybe when it isn’t exactly deserved because well where would WE be without it. But how about the other people in our lives? Our friends? Relatives? Colleagues? We tend to remember our own pluses and other people’s minuses. In your relationships do you remember people for when they came through for you or when they didn’t? Do you hold to the memories of the slight, the harsh words, the times you were ignored or left out? Do you allow the good stuff to stick with you too - the times you were included, respected and loved?

We often think of memories as out of our control, they come floating in and out. But when it comes to the work of the season - remembering is muscle memory act. Perhaps this is why this theme fills the season. Like all spiritual and religious acts we can control much of what we remember. We can decide, discipline ourselves into thinking of the good things too - our own but also others. We can choose to balance out someone wronging us with the right they did too. This does not include letting go before we have gone through the process of teshuvah or when the harm is so profoundly damaging but it does include lots of other moments and relationships. We can remember the goodness along with the struggles, the pain and the hurt. We can choose to see the other as the complex person they are - we all have moments when we tried but couldn’t actualize our potential, we can hold onto the potential without remembering it did not actualize.

Remembering is an act of holding on but its flip side is letting go. And we must in this season, to do the work of teshuvah do both - hold on and let go. The work is in knowing when to lean which way and when the other. Remembering is a sacred act so decide how do you want to be remembered when should someone let go of your mistakes, errors and their hurt? And when should they elevate your goodness, kindness and acts of deep giving? And can you do the same toward your friend, your partner, your colleague - can remember and let go all at the same time of the good and the bad, the slight and the triumphs? In this way remembering elevates the person in all their complexity and holds the relationship as sacred and valuable and most assuredly flawed?

Zichronot - what will you choose to remember about the other and what will they remember about you - the sacred task of memory.

I often think of this line during this season. We all have parts of ourselves that need extra protection - qualities we are sensitive about, aspects of our selves that are a bit battered or relationships that require extra time and wrapping. Attention to the parts that we lay bare. It is not a failure, it is not a weakness it is an essential part of the work of introspection and reflection. It is crucial to prepare yourself for the “ring”, for the fight, to spend the time thinking through and watching yourself and others and knowing what needs a bit more focus, a bit of extra care and wrap, a bit of a buffer between the world, the interaction with the other and the self.

So take care to wrap those wrists and hearts, and minds and your soul- your own and those you love. So when we climb the ropes and get in the ring we are our strongest selves.

Clip of it:

https://boxcast.tv/highlights/shabbat-shalom-wi6hkcydzsyyxpfmeat5/iyo3wkuxs4vgoklu9eip/dea9ojdf601t41ypue1w

Full Sermon can be found here:

https://www.adasisrael.org/livestream (5/31 9:25 am link)

Written form:

Parshat Bamidbar
May 31st, 2025 – 3 Sivan 5785 (Day 603, 48)
Adas Israel (Smith Sanctuary)

These days, whenever you ask someone how they’re doing, there’s a pause—a pregnant pause. And it always evokes the same thought in me: they have no idea how to answer. Even if, in your own personal life, things are "fine"—if you’re blessed with health, meaningful work, a strong marriage—there’s still a shadow. A sense of sadness, fear, or anger.

I often try to cover the discomfort with a half-joking qualifier: “I know. What I mean is not how the world is—but how are you?” Still, the discomfort remains. The political climate, the war in Israel and Gaza, the staggering loss of life, climate despair, the fragile geopolitics we wake up to each morning—all weigh on us. And that’s to say nothing of our own personal burdens.

The world feels so incredibly broken. And this Shabbat, as Sarah Milgrim’s family sits shiva, and Yaron Lashinsky’s parents bury their son in Israel, the pain and grief, the rage and the darkness, can feel like they will swallow us whole.

What are we to do?

Our parsha opens with what seems like a simple verse—one the rabbis could not leave alone:

וַיְדַבֵּ֨ר יְהוָ֧ה אֶל־מֹשֶׁ֛ה בְּמִדְבַּ֥ר סִינַ֖י בְּאֹ֣הֶל מוֹעֵ֑ד בְּאֶחָ֩ד לַחֹ֨דֶשׁ הַשֵּׁנִ֜י בַּשָּׁנָ֣ה הַשֵּׁנִ֗ית לְצֵאתָם֙ מֵאֶ֣רֶץ מִצְרַ֔יִם לֵאמֹֽר׃
“Adonai spoke to Moshe in the Wilderness of Sinai, in the Tent of Meeting, on the first day of the second month, in the second year after they had come out from the land of Egypt.”

At first glance, it’s almost boring. A time. A place. Two protagonists. A divine meeting. But the rabbis sense there’s more. And absent a clear explanation in the Torah, they ask a profound question: Why did God speak to Moshe in the wilderness?

If the promise of Torah is tied to the promise of the land, why wasn’t the Torah given in the land of Israel?

Rabbi Nathan Lopes Cardozo writes:

“A desert is a lonely place, completely forsaken. There is neither food nor water, nor any other form of sustaining substance. There is only the unbearable sun and its heat… In a desert, death stares you in the face. It is a dangerous place, unlivable and outrageous.”

So why, of all places, is this the nexus of our covenant? Why was our peoplehood forged in such vulnerability?

One famous Midrash gives a metaphorical answer:

“Why in the wilderness of Sinai? From here the Sages taught that the Torah was given in three things: in fire, in water, and in the wilderness… Just as these are free to all, so too the words of Torah are free… And anyone who does not make themselves like the wilderness—open, ownerless, humble—cannot acquire wisdom or Torah.”

The rabbis are teaching that Torah is given in the wilderness because it is only when we become like the wilderness—receptive, vulnerable, unclaimed—that we can truly receive it.

Another version in the Talmud adds: Once a person makes herself like a wilderness—deserted before all—Torah is given to her as a gift.

But what does it really mean to be like wilderness?

The desert is neither public nor private. It belongs to no one. It is fully exposed, subject to the elements. And so, too, must we be—imply the sages—if we are to become true recipients of Torah. In the words of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks z”l, the Torah speaks to a soul that has learned the art of living in uncertainty.

And yet—I have to confess—I’ve always felt something was missing from these interpretations. They never quite answered the question for me. I revisited them this week and still found them wanting.

And then, in the midst of a particularly dark moment—after watching part of Sarah’s funeral—I came across a snippet of an interview. It offered me something I want to call Torah.

“For me, all of life is a choice. From the first day of captivity, I believed this. I did not choose to be taken captive. I did not choose what happened to us. But I did always choose how to respond, what to hold onto, and how to remain a human. Those things helped me choose life. I could have given up after hearing about my wife and daughters on the day I was released. I could have let the sorrow bury me. Or I could look for a way to keep going. And I chose life, I chose light, and I chose to move forward and to love. I cry a lot. I am connected to my loss and pain—and it will accompany me my entire life—but never instead of my life.”

These are the words of Eli Sharabi, two months after being released from captivity after 491 days. On October 7, he was violently taken from his home on Kibbutz Be’eri. On the day of his release, he learned that his wife Lianne and daughters Noiya and Yael had been murdered, found in an embrace in their safe room.

Listen again to his words: “The loss and sadness will accompany me for my entire life—but never instead of my life.”

This is Torah. And with that Torah, I want to return to our verse from Bamidbar, and to a “rabbinic cheat”—by looking just a bit ahead, to the opening verses of next week’s parsha.

There, we are told about the ערי מקלט—cities of refuge—where a person who had accidentally killed someone could flee until their case could be heard:

“Then Moses set aside three cities… to which one who killed another unintentionally could flee—and live..Bezer, in the wilderness …

And the very next verse reads:

וְזֹ֖את הַתּוֹרָ֑ה אֲשֶׁר־שָׂ֣ם מֹשֶׁ֔ה לִפְנֵ֖י בְּנֵ֥י יִשְׂרָאֵֽל׃

“This is the Torah that Moshe set before the Israelites.”

The Talmud in Makkot asks: Why this juxtaposition? And Rabbi Yochanan answers with a single line:
“This teaches that Torah is a refuge.”

That’s the answer to our question. The Torah was given in the wilderness because the wilderness is where we need it most. The Torah is the answer to the wilderness of life.

Our people were born bamidbar—in the in-between, in the place that is no place. That’s where the Torah had to be given. Because it is in these moments—when we are lost, unmoored, aching, unsure—when we need Torah most.

We are a desert people. A people who know vulnerability. Who live on the precipice. And in these days—of economic uncertainty, of rampant antisemitism, of a precarious Israel, of rising global conflict, of climate crisis and despair—it feels like we’re not just in the wilderness, but stuck in it. It is real . And as Eli Sharabi teaches us, the wilderness can bury you. Your values, your faith, your rituals, your ethical compass—they can all be lost in the darkness. So what do we do?

We return to Torah.

Torah does not remove us from the wilderness. But it travels with us through it. It is our shade and our compass, our song and our shield. Even in the darkest night or the most blistering heat, we can turn to it for refuge.

Sharabi, who has experienced the worst of the human condition, reminds us: we must still live. We must still choose Torah in its broadest sense. It is everything that Judaism has gifted us - wisdom, ritual, ethics, community, obligation and responsibility.

When things are dark - go study Torah. When you feel powerless: give tzedakah. When you are in despair pray, go to minyan on a. Wednesday morning or evening. When you are bereft immerse in the mikvah. When you are worried fill your shabbat table. . When you feel lonely come eat cheesecake with us and learn Torah with us on Shavuot. Go clean up rock creek park and notice the trees and the birds and the rushing water. When you are in the wilderness of your life or our world stop looking into the bright screen in your hands and open up a Chumash and study.

Send your children and grandchildren to Jewish learning opportunities: day school, religious school, summer camp, trips to Israel. Pick up a new mitzvah. Come to our weekly meditation offerings. Volunteer for chesed.

We may not yet reach our leaders. But in the words of Rachel Goldberg-Polin at her recent commencement address: “We are what we do.”

We are in the wilderness - it is truly dangerous- real enemies and elements that will not relent - but this is the moment of revelation too - it is the chance to receive Torah again and again every time we face the blazing sun, the scorpions at our feet, the weariness of journey with no clear path to our destination. Listen to Rachel and do Torah.

Because that’s what the Jewish people were born for.

Shabbat Shalom.

It's been a week since this small human finished his time at Adas Israel Gan Hayeled Nursery school and we, Stephanie Wethington finished up our time as parents in the school. With a short break in between kids for about 1 year and then the year+ that Covid stole from us we have been sheparding our kids through this wonderful home away from home for a decade. From their earliest days in Kangaroos with the incredible Dale Madden Sorcher to the last days in Shoshanim we couldn't have asked for a better first experience in schooling. I can't stop thinking about why I was so emotional the last few weeks about this particular transition - I am not the nostalgic type (see other parent above).

To be sure some of my weepiness was about what COVID took from Z and his experience in another school in the off year but it was something more and it took me a week to get there. When we send our children into the world through school we have relinquished a significant amount of control and impact on their lives. This might begin with childcare at a younger age but once formal schooling begins the release is much bigger - they are influence, shaped, moved, grown by so many other people and places. Teachers to be sure, but peer groups and other adults and the experience of being away from their parents. The stories they hear, the way they play, the lessons they learned, the way they are treated and taught by their teachers and their peers starts to have a power in shaping who they are becoming. And it is risky and brave to do this - every day Z said to me, "why do you have to leave?" Good question I would say, hard to answer but I know I do and so do you. We would hug each other many times and then I would do just that leave him in the hands of his incredible teachers.

In these earliest experiences, even with a 3rd child, this is jarring. The release of all we thought we controlled in order to let them, our children, find their place and way in the world. We witness them navigate other adults and their rules and boundaries, we watch as they struggle to negotiate social dynamics and find their voice. We also witness their joy, passion and love not for us but for other things and people.

I often recount how we chose the schools our children currently attend and I start by telling people I was rather crazy visiting many many schools for Kindergarten for A and E. I convince myself that I was “trying to find the perfect place” for our family. And while I always get a good laugh at myself, underneath the humor is a very real truth. Being a parent is responsibility beyond anything you can dream of and so when we see our children walk through classroom doors we are sharing some of that with their school world. And when it works, when it is the right place and the right moment there is a gratitude beyond measure filled with tears, joy, worry, laughter and love. To watch your child walk in the world and find their footing, to grow not because you did a darn thing but because the place they spend most of their waking hours is filled with learning and love, joy and silliness, meaning and celebration, curiosity and adventure - that is the nexus of the building of a human one who will be a contributing member of this broken world, with the skills ready to bring their unique voice to it's repair. And when the school isn't right and you have to start again there is a deep pain in that or when our kids struggle in the outside world we are shattered.

And so to see Z flourish and grow, experience all that is good about this transition from our home to being at home in the world well that is a gift that I never want to stop opening over and over again. And I pray that the tikkun (repair) this year gave him, the healing he experienced, the growth, the goodness, the warmth, the hiking adventures, the challenges that brought him home each day with stories and silliness I hope that is always how it will be for him and when it isn't I hope and pray the resilience he built, the confidence and love he carries, the curiosity and bravery he harnessed will hold him and carry him through. You are one of a kind Z and we love you so very much.

PS A HUGE continued hat tip, gratitude and love, even as our children have aged out of her school, to Stephanie Sklarin Slater who is literally a parents best friend and guide in rearing this humans and with whom we have shared every bump along the way. Without her wisdom, her guidance, thoughtfulness and ability to hold parental tears we would be a mess.

That was our 13-year-old daughter’s response (shared with her permission) this morning at 7:30 a.m., when my wife and I sat our children down to “talk.” This wasn’t the first such conversation—these moments have become increasingly common over the last 20+ months.

What happened late last night in Washington, D.C. was that two young people—one Jewish American, one Christian Israeli—were gunned down in an act of targeted violence outside a Jewish museum. A museum where I’ve taught Torah. A place where I’ve gathered with my community for moments of celebration and joy.

Our children attend a Jewish day school. We knew there would be heightened security. We knew they would hear something from friends. And we wanted to be the ones to tell them—once again—that Jews are being targeted with hatred, violence, and harm.

It is painful to write those words. It was far more painful to say them aloud to two 13-year-olds and an 8.5-year-old.

I could almost perfectly predict their reactions. One cool and externally calm. One not-so-tiny second grader, absolutely petrified and shocked. And then our daughter, who without hesitation, pulled her knees in close and said the sentence that’s echoed in my mind all day:
“I am so proud of being Jewish, but I don’t want to be killed.”

I’ve tried to understand why her words landed so deeply. Why they rooted in my soul.

They were with me all day. As I swam laps to release my rage into the water. As I binge-shopped at the grocery store. As I tried to offer comfort on several pastoral calls. As I put together a text sheet, hands shaking. As I wept into the challah dough while kneading. As I cooked dinner with quiet resolve.

In all these moments, as I thought about Sarah and Yaron, I thought about Ayla.

The Ayla who has been joyfully living her Judaism long before she could choose it consciously.
The Ayla who stood on the bimah three months ago and took on the yoke of Torah and Jewish peoplehood as her own.
The Ayla who often tells me my way of practicing Judaism is “terribly annoying.”
The Ayla whose parent holds a visibly Jewish job.
The Ayla who sees me wear a visibly Jewish head covering every single day.

This Ayla is taking the tedious, courageous steps onto what Rabbi Nachman of Breslov called “the very narrow bridge.” He wrote, “the entire world is a very narrow bridge the essential thing is not to be afraid.”

She knows—she’s no fool—that to become the Jewish person she is unfolding into, she must walk across the bridge - And the bridge looks pretty darn risky.

And perhaps sooner than most, she’s learned the lesson Torah has taught us for millennia:
Long before we had to explain that “globalize the intifada” is a call for our deaths.
Long before we had to plead for others to understand that “from the river to the sea” means we’d be in the sea.
Long before every concern we raised was dismissed as imagined, the voice of privilege. The privilege to be killed I guess.

The Torah taught us:
“There is a people that dwells apart — הֶן־עָם֙ לְבָדָ֣ד יִשְׁכֹּ֔ן.”

This apartness makes the bridge approach terrifying. Sometimes, if we are lucky, we have a Yaron—someone who holds our hand as we cross who maybe isn’t the same as us, or whose identity is multi-faceted and complex. Those people are our people too. They dwell with us.

But often, we walk alone.

I think this is the fear Rabbi Nachman warns about—not the feeling of fear itself, but the instinct to turn back, to run away from the narrowness, to try to blend in, to hide. He doesn’t tell us to be unafraid—he tells us not to let fear dictate our steps.

As my friend Rachel says, the only way to deal with fear is through it. If I could what follows is what I would say to Ayla.

*With gratitude to Rachel for her wisdom, her Torah and her many many phone calls today. And to our moms group for our newly found connections.

Dear Ayla,

One of the most insightful chassidic masters once said, “The world is a very narrow bridge. The essential thing is not to be afraid.”

As you approach this bridge, it will seem narrow. The drop below, endless. The slats, rickety.

Things look bad, dangerous, and risky—because they are.

And I’m sorry, Ayla, that I’ve brought you to this precipice. This moment.

You’ll want to turn around. You’ll want to run away or find another path. And you’re smart—very smart (smarter than Ima and Mommy). But here’s what I know with certainty:

Whatever workaround you come up with—and you will come up with one - it won’t every fully “work”. Our people we have tried everything - to be more like the surrounding culture, to change our path so it looked more like everyone else. We have tried to run away or to quietly go about our business to avoid being noticed. But no matter what Ayla to discover who you are, to be Jewish in the fullness of that word - religiously, culturally, ethnically, to embrace your people, your tradition and your God you have to cross the bridge. That is simply how you get home.

Your home. Your people. Your soul. Your God. Your land.

To come close to those things—to feel their warmth, their love, their sorrow, their joy—you must step forward.
To dance at weddings and walk together at funerals.
To pray as a Jew. To live and love as a Jew. To study Torah and argue with it.
You must take one step after another. Into the breech.

Each step may feel unsteady at first. But the more you move toward the other side, the steadier you will become. The fear still there. The rickety bridge you are still on it. Dangers are still all around.

The bridge will always be narrow. Risky. Scary.

But Rabbi Nachman didn’t say “don’t fear.” He said:
“The essential thing is not to be afraid.”

That doesn’t mean fear isn’t real. I feel it too.

It means: don’t let the fear stop you from stepping forward.

Step into your Jewishness with pride. With reverence. With strength, hope, passion, peoplehood. With Torah’s wisdom. And yes, Ayla—with love for your homeland, too.

The good news? I’m on the bridge with you. And so is Mommy. So are Baba and Zada. And my grandparents, of blessed memory. And so many generations before us and so many who love you now, who walk right alongside you - fear and all.

We, I cannot erase the danger that is very clear. Sarah looked so much like how imagine you will someday. But Ayla, you are not alone.
You are part of generations of this people.
You are not alone. And on the other side of the bridge - the home you will find there? Still has fear but there right there next to the fear is a rich tapestry of meaning and purpose, of love and hope, of peace and potential and of joy. And there is place where you are obligated to others and others obligated to you mutually caring for each other - even when it is risky. And there you can shine for being the beautiful, brilliant, sassy Jewish woman you are.

Recently I was talking to friends and said that I feel so different and out of the corner of my eye I saw my wife nodding (this was not a nod of joy). I felt a stab of pain knowing that in addition to atrocities of that שבת שחורה - the murdered, kidnapped, raped, tortured, the many many lives and families destroyed, homes burned and decimated, children scared - for many Jews I know, a tiny but powerful consequence of a post 10/7 world is that we are fundamentally different.

She asked me later, my wife, how I thought I was different. I don’t think she was asking because those changes have been easy for people around me to witness. I think she was trying to understand me now like she did in the before times. I could not answer.

I pretended today like it was a normal post holiday, post funeral officiation, post weekend Monday. I don’t “work” on Mondays. I work out, catch up on household tasks (I’m the COO of the house), run errands and sometimes if I am lucky have lunch or coffee with a friend. Everything about my day on the outside was “normal” I did all those things. Except in between each errand I read a poem and wept, in the car waiting for this or that I listened to stories of heroism and sobbed, I studied in preparation for a sermon and I couldn’t stop thinking about the Sheryl Sandberg documentary.

I do not want to analyze every aspect of what this has shattered for me. I do not want to have to explain why after the worse lose of Jewish life since the Shoah a Jew, a rabbi no less, would be different, altogether changed. I do not want to have to explain why shouting at me about being a supporter of genocide because I wear a kippah is an experience that shapes how I now see the world. I do not want to try and unpack why Israel is where I wish I was as odd as that might sound.

It is not that I don’t experience joy I do. It is not that I don’t live or love. I do. I giggle with my kids and cuddle with my wife. I am prouder to be Jewish now than I ever have been. I celebrate every small win, every great sermon or class, I hang onto every person I love with a grip that will not let go.

But all along I am pretending because today is October 7th, 2024 and my soul, my heart are shattered into tiny pieces in the ether back on October 7th, 2023

יהי זכרום ברוך